Teaching About Religion

While the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited public schools from engaging in devotional teaching of religion, it is clear that public schools may teach about religion in an academic way. As the Court said in 1963:

[I]t might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that the study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.

Comments such as these have opened the door to a movement to teach about religion in the public schools, a movement that has had added vigor since the attacks of September 11, 2001, when it became clear that we cannot understand our world or our nation without understanding religion.

Indeed, this movement is maturing, with many urging those who set education policy to move beyond what Yale University professor Jon Butler has called the "jack-in-the-box" approach [PDF] to religion's role in history. Butler explained:

[W]e have a kind of jack-in-the-box history in which religion pops up mysteriously in American history textbooks in the 1980s. Why? Because someone has to explain how Ronald Reagan came to the presidency. Someone has to explain the "Christian Right" and the liberal response. If the textbooks describe a movement called the Moral Majority, they don't explain where the Moral Majority came from or how it came to exercise so much political power so suddenly.

Many are attempting to pursue a more systematic and organic form of teaching about religion's impact on history. A conference jointly sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center entitled, Teaching About Religion: Where Do We Go From Here?, confronted some of these challenging issues.

Scholars at the post-secondary level also have recognized a need to attend to these concerns. A draft document authored by a group of scholars examines concerns regarding the intersection of religion and public life and the role higher education must and should play in response to those concerns. The document is entitled: Religion and Public Life: Engaging Higher Education.